MOVIE REVIEW: 'West of Memphis' chronicles a miscarriage of justice

Frodo not only saved Middle-Earth, he also played a key role in rescuing a wrongly convicted man from dying in the Arkansas gas chamber.

By Al Alexander

The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA

By Al Alexander

Posted Mar. 15, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Mar 15, 2013 at 3:11 PM

By Al Alexander

Posted Mar. 15, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Mar 15, 2013 at 3:11 PM

» Social News

Frodo not only saved Middle-Earth, he also played a key role in rescuing a wrongly convicted man from dying in the Arkansas gas chamber. The prisoner was Damien Echols, and after rotting for 18 years in a Razorback penitentiary he was on schedule to finally take that long final walk down Death Row. Then, just in the nick of time, Peter Jackson summarily stepped in offering piles of his “Lord of the Rings” cash to not only stay the execution, but also to finally free Echols and his co-defendants, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley.

How the Oscar-winning director and his wife and partner, Fran Walsh, accomplished this Samaritan feat is rivetingly chronicled in “West of Memphis,” a documentary that at first seems redundant, given that the story of Echols and his equally innocent “accomplices” was well covered by HBO’s three “Paradise Lost” films. But the deeper director Amy Berg and her vast team of experts (funded by the Jacksons) dig into the 1993 murder of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark., the fresher the story becomes. It also effectively condenses what took the “Paradise Lost” films nearly eight hours to reveal into a tight, snappy 149 minutes that affords you everything you need to know about how the West Memphis Three, as they came to be known, were railroaded through a politically motivated court system that cared more about convictions than justice.

Many villains emerge on both sides of the law, but what really tears at you is the tremendous amount of empathy you feel not only for the mothers of victims Chris Byers, Steve Branch and Michael Moore, but also the three defendants, all of whom were clueless teenagers at the time of the crime. And a police force that was both lazy and incompetent used the suspects’ naivety to their full advantage, from failing to interview potential witnesses and misinterpreting evidence to coercing a “confession” from the mentally challenged Misskelley. The cops look like Sister Teresa, though, in comparison with the judges and prosecutors, all of whom opted to ignore both the lack of evidence against the boys and the mountain of proof verifying their innocence.

Berg methodically walks you through the case, from the day of the murders in May 1993 to the jubilant moment 18 years later when the three finally walk free. She even builds a convincing case against the stepfather of one of the murder victims, a “person of interest” the police never bothered to investigate, despite a large amount of evidence pointing in his direction, including samples of his DNA found at the gruesome crime scene. What galls you most, though, is the thought of just how many other young men like Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley are rotting in jail without a Peter Jackson or other West Memphis Three champions like Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines coming to their very public defense. You sense that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them locked away for no better reason than the color of their skin or, as is the case with the WM3, the way they look, whether it be the length of their hair or the type of clothing the narrow minded immediately associate with satanic cults, as was the case here.

Page 2 of 2 - While the police and the courts absorb most of the blame, Berg makes it clear that both a quick-to-convict press and a lynch-mob mentality among the good citizens of West Memphis also contributed to a reprehensible miscarriage of justice. And if there’s a lesson to be gained from “West of Memphis,” it’s to treat others the way you’d want them to treat you. Because if we don’t, it could well be any of us taking that Death Row walk for something we didn’t do. And it’s highly unlikely Frodo will be there to save us.